Rules are great for automatically filing emails into folders as they come in or processing them in other ways. The problem with them is they act on the messages BEFORE you get to read them, which is too soon. And they may not want to file the message immediately when ...

When you create a new mail rule you'll find it at the end of the rules' list. Moving it up is incredibly time-consuming if you have a bunch of rules. So one option would be to move a rule directly to the top/bottom level.